


from asunder

by andromedaries



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Drinking, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prostitution, Sexual Content, Swearing, the rape/non con warning is in reference to the forced prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-19 00:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22235626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andromedaries/pseuds/andromedaries
Summary: all the things Haymitch Abernathy lost, and all the things he found.“I resisted them since day one and got everyone I loved killed for it. And knowing me, sweetheart, I’ll do it again, so do yourself a favor and keep your distance.” He turns away, slugging back another gulp of his drink. “All you’d be is leverage for him to use against me.”Somewhere under the fog of alcohol he knows he’s being cruel, but as much as he wishes he didn’t have to hurt his friend, he knows she won’t give up if she thinks he wants this too.
Relationships: Haymitch Abernathy & Haymitch's Girl, Haymitch Abernathy/Effie Trinket
Comments: 6
Kudos: 51





	from asunder

**Author's Note:**

> please note the tags for content warnings! everything is more or less canon compliant, but the hunger games had some dark themes so please be aware. violence is canon-typical, sexual content is more detailed than canon-typical but not super explicit. also noteworthy that i do not have personal experience with ptsd or forced prostitution, so if you are knowledgeable on these subjects and have suggestions for improving my depictions, i am very open to feedback! this is my first fic so please be kind!
> 
> edit: in retrospect i hate like 97% of this fic lol i regret everything buuuuut orphaning a fic feels mean so here we are

“So Haymitch, what do you think of the Games having 100% more competitors than usual this year?”

He shrugs. “I don’t see that it makes much difference. They’ll still be 100% as stupid as usual, so I figure my odds will be roughly the same.”

The audience roars with laughter. Good. If he’s going to win this thing, he thinks, approval can only help.

“Now I do have one more question for you, Haymitch. Some of your fans in the audience have been dying to know,” Caesar turns a conspiratorial eye to the crowd, “if this handsome young lad on our stage here has a special someone back home?” Haymitch can barely hear the end of the sentence over the deafening encouragement from the crowd, noticeably higher-pitched this time.

Haymitch redirects his insuppressible eye-roll into an expression appropriate for good-natured teasing with his most charming half-smile, buying himself a moment to consider his answer. Briar, his mentor, had warned him against appearing too besotted with anyone back home, eyes flicking over the other tributes from 12. Sedge Greenleaf, devastatingly young and scared, only 12 years old. Copper Stearne, barely a year older, frozen with that glassy shock in her eyes since her name was called. And Maysilee Donner, tall and lithe and fair and seventeen enough that the Capitol felt justified in salivating over her. She isn’t ostentatiously pretty in the way the tributes from the overfed career districts are, but there are more than enough Capitol folks who are bored with that. Whenever tributes of the same district are anywhere close to the same age, anywhere close to good-looking, the Capitol viewers are relentless in their efforts to conjure up tragic star-crossed romances between them. As if the games aren’t already voyeuristic enough.

“Well,” he hedges, breathing half a laugh that he hopes sounds charmingly abashed, “I suppose there is a girl back home who’s more than a friend to me.” He grins at Caesar then. “But she’s _terribly_ camera shy, she’d never want me rambling on about her on live TV.” The audience groans their protests, and Haymitch is glad he has their vapid attention. Although, he thinks, anyone with three brain cells and a pair of eyelashes to bat around could win over these technicolor airheads.

“No, Haymitch, don’t tease us like that! Tell us about her!” Caesar laughs, clapping a hand on his shoulder. Haymitch just grins wickedly and shakes his head.

“Nope! Not a word! You’ll all just have to wait to meet her until after I win.” 

“Ah, you certainly know how to keep us on the edge of our seats. And we can’t wait to see how that will play out in the arena! Haymitch Abernathy everyone!” The audience drowns out his thoughts with their applause.

Staring at the sleepless ceiling that night, Haymitch replays the interview in his head for the thirtieth time. Despite how little he esteems that audience’s opinion of him, he knows their favor and potential sponsorship is vital if he’s going to survive. But they hadn’t been his only audience; what had his family back in 12 been thinking when they saw it? Asher probably thought it was brilliant, the way only younger brothers can. His mother probably despaired silently that his attitude would come back to do much worse than just bite him, but she would keep a determined hope in her voice for Asher’s sake. And Aspen... Haymitch flops over onto his stomach and scrubs his hand-heels into his eyes. Aspen deserves so much better than being minimized for strategic effect in a game show. He knows she’ll understand - she’s smart and rational and she knows he is too, and she’ll know anything he says in the Capitol comes from survival strategy, not from his heart. But he also knows she doesn’t deserve to have to be understanding of this. Doesn’t deserve to watch him downplay what she meant to him for the whole world to see. Doesn’t deserve to hear complete strangers gossip about how cute he’d be with that Maysilee Donner.

He spares another thought for Maysilee Donner, unsleeping on the other side of the wall behind his head. Caesar had asked in her interview, after she disappointed his inquiries about a sweetheart back home, if she thought she might catch the eye of that dashing young Haymitch from her district. In another life, maybe. If there could even be any life where Haymitch were here if Aspen weren’t. And if Haymitch and Maysilee weren’t about to fight to the death for the Capitol’s amusement, as they seem so fond of forgetting when they’re imagining their ridiculous mockeries of romance.

The audience’s shipping of tributes, he realizes, feeds quite neatly into the celebrity prostitution purported to be rampant among victors after their games. If the viewers have been fetishizing these people, sexualizing these _kids_ , all along, what’s stopping them from acting on it once they’re out of the arena? He wonders if the Capitol’s law about the age of informed consent even applies to victors. Once you’re old enough to murder children, he figures, maybe the rest of the rules don’t seem to matter so much anymore.

He gnaws on his bottom lip. He and Aspen, capable, tender, vicious Aspen, whom he loved more fiercely than he ever thought he could, weren’t even... _there_ yet. Although, he supposes, there are reasons for that in 12 that people in the Capitol probably have ways around. Still, he can’t imagine what could drive those past victors to submit to a lifetime of being made a commodity. There isn’t enough money in the world, he thinks. If he manages to survive the arena, they’ll never take him alive again.

He tries not to pick at the thought, nagging at the edge of his mind, that something much more persuasive than money must be compelling them.

\-----

“We’d live longer with two of us,” Maysilee says, slinging her blowdart gun back over her shoulder.

“Guess you just proved that,” Haymitch says, shaking off adrenaline and wiping blood from his nose. He stares down at the dead tribute - the boy from 4, maybe? - collapsed at his feet, poison dart sticking out of his neck, knife that had been seconds away from slitting Haymitch’s throat still clutched in his hand. “Allies?” he asks, taking the knife and sheathing it through a belt loop. She nods succinctly. They both kneel to raid their conquests’ belongings, and between the boy from 4 and his two allies that lay lifelessly behind him, they’re rewarded with four new knives and almost a whole backpack full of food.

Haymitch has, as it turns out, underestimated Maysilee Donner. He hadn’t intended to play allies with anyone, but now, seeing the cave she’d been camping in, he’s thrilled she sought him out. The cave is spacious, more than big enough for two people, and the craggy rock walls that jut in around its mouth would make excellent cover for defense with a blowdart gun. Especially blowdarts assisted by any of the huge pile of spectacularly colorful fruits and flowers Haymitch sees pushed to one side of the cave, which he assumes are, like everything else in this arena, lethally poisonous. He looks back at Maysilee, impressed and not hiding it. She grins.

“I do alright for myself.”

“No shit... that dart gun is brilliant. How many have you gotten with it?”

“Including that boy from 4 earlier, that’ll be six now.” He holds her eyes but doesn’t congratulate her. She probably can’t bring herself to be proud of this either.

He looks away to survey the cave again. “Not bad, Donner, not bad at all.”

Dusk is blushing that treacherous sky outside a radiant flaming orange. Haymitch sits facing out of the cave, leaning against his backpack. Maysilee sits beside him, and they both stare out at that unnervingly, cruelly beautiful landscape that lay all around them, in which 47 children are standing in their graves.

Haymitch pulls an apple out of his backpack and slices off a bite with his knife. Then another, which he hands to Maysilee. He chews slowly, but notices his ally is not doing the same. He doesn’t say anything, just continues slicing off bites and handing her two for every one he eats himself.

They eat the apple down to nothing, core and all. Nothing but two seeds left. He drops one into her hand. “I bet you the first watch you can’t spit that apple seed farther than I can.”

She laughs, a real, genuine laugh that 47 kids would probably never laugh again. “You’re on.” Her appleseed outflies his by a solid yard. He laughs and makes a mental note to stop underestimating Maysilee Donner.

They sit back down and watch the flaming sky fade slowly into inky twilight. She leans her head on his shoulder in the silence that would be companionable if they were anywhere but here. He feels a twinge called Aspen gnaw at him for a moment, but he can’t begrudge Maysilee this small moment of warmth in their foxhole. He rests his head on top of hers and silently entreats Aspen not to begrudge it either.

While Maysilee sleeps and he keeps the first watch, he lets his mind wander back to Aspen. The way her steely Seam eyes looked by flickering candlelight when she looked up at him, kissing her way back up his stomach and chest and shoulder, nipping at his neck, tangling her fingers in his hair. The way her dark hair fell around her face when she lay under him, blunt nails skidding down his back, almost scratching, and wandering back up his stomach, almost tickling. He closes his eyes and vows to himself for what feels like the thousandth time that he would live to see her again. Live to smell her hair again. Live to kiss her fingertips again. Live to marvel at her razor-sharp mind and her fierce determination again.

Maysilee stops behind him to lean against a tree. Haymitch huffs impatiently. “I need to rest,” she insists.

“Not yet. We need to keep going.”

“Why?”

“Because it has to end somewhere, right? The arena can’t go on forever.”

“What do you expect to find?”

“I don’t know. But maybe there’s something we can use.”

“We’re not gonna find anything better than that cave. I want to get back before someone else finds it.”

He resumes beating his way through the trees. She sighs and follows him.

Finally they break through the edge of the woods and find themselves on flat, dry earth that leads to a cliff. Far below, they can see jagged rocks.

“That’s all there is, Haymitch. Let’s go back.”

“No, I’m staying here,” Haymitch says, gaze still searching the rocks below them.

“Alright. There’s only five of us left. May as well say goodbye now, anyway,” she says, eyes impassive. “I don’t want it to come down to you and me.”

“Okay.”

She turns to leave, back the way they came. She doesn’t look back, and neither does he. He continues his scrutiny of the cliff, kicking a few pebbles over the edge.

It hasn’t been ten minutes before he hears the shriek that fills his stomach with cold dread. It’s her. Who else could it be? He sprints back toward the scream, crashing through trees and brush until he comes to a clearing where Maysilee is sprawled in a fast-growing pool of blood. He slams to his knees beside her and realizes, horribly, that there’s nothing he can do. Blood is issuing from her torn throat at an impossible rate, in impossible volume. He grabs one of her futile hands away from her throat and tries to keep her panic-stricken eyes on his own. Her lips form the shape of his name, but her shredded throat makes no sound. He strokes her hair as her writhing and struggling, then finally her breathing, gradually slow into stillness.

The cannon sounds. He squeezes his eyes shut. Releasing his vise grip on her hand, he leans down to push her blood-soaked hair away from her face. The droning sound of her hovercraft grows louder as he takes one of the flowers from her bag, intended to be used for dart-poison, and tucks it behind her ear. He kisses her forehead as the hovercraft’s metal arm reaches down to bear her away, back to her sobbing family in a dull metal box.

He watches the hovercraft disappear over the treeline. At least she died quickly, he thinks dully. At least she died with a friend beside her. He thought it a small, grim victory that the Capitol couldn’t take that from them. Even the arena couldn’t turn them all against each other - that had to count for something.

Callista, Haymitch thinks dimly, beneath the ringing in his ears and the adrenaline burning up his veins and the blood soaking his hand as he sprints toward the arena’s edge, beneath the blinding pain in his stomach as he tries to hold all his guts in the right place. Her name is Callista, the girl from 1 pursuing him with an axe in her hand and an incensed rage in her one eye that hadn’t been gouged into bloody nothingness.

His vision starts going dark around the edges and he wonders insanely how much blood he’s lost. He can barely keep his feet under him, but he knows if he can just make it to the edge of the forcefield he has a chance. The idea is ludicrous, a wild Hail Mary of a plan, but Callista has insinuated herself between him and his knife and it’s the last option he has. He doesn’t think about what if it doesn’t work. It has to work.

Finally at the edge of the cliff that he knows is also the edge of the arena, his convulsing legs finally betray him and he skids to his knees. Callista hurls her axe at his head. He ducks it. They hold their breath and stare frozen at each other for half a moment, and when he sees her eyes widen, he ducks again. The axe flies back over his shoulder and buries itself in her face.

The delirious blackness around his vision presses in closer and closer. A cannon sounds and he doesn’t know if it’s hers or his own. His last deranged thought as the hovercraft sound approaches is an up-yours to the gamemakers, whose prison-walls he used to his advantage. The cage they put him in became his weapon. He laughs madly as the trumpets sound and his vision fades to black.

Years later, for the rest of his life, he’d learn over and over again just how much the gamemakers resent being outsmarted.

Haymitch wakes up to bright lights and sterile, scratchy sheets. Hospital, he thinks. So I guess I won. He had expected to feel relief wash over him in this moment, but it doesn’t come. He doesn’t feel anything really. Just echoing, blank un-feeling. He tries moving his arms. The dull, burning ache in his gut comes pounding back and he remembers Callista’s axe in his stomach, remembers blood pouring over his hand as he held his guts in. He remembers the axe splitting her face. A hand to his stomach now finds it predictably swathed in mounds of some unfamiliar type of bandage.

The door bursts open and Haymitch’s prep team as well as several doctors all flood into the room. They’re a blur of congratulating him and poking and prodding at various wounds and various beeping machines around him and he endures it because he can’t summon the energy to tell them to fuck off. Fuzzy warmth crawls up his arm and he guesses they put something new in the IV taped in his elbow.

Finally Briar comes in and shoos everyone away from the bedside. Thank God, Haymitch thinks, someone else from 12. These Capitol poodles have somehow gotten even more unbearable since before the arena.

“Glad you made it, kid.” Another victor, of all people, knows better than to congratulate him or gush how thrilled and proud everyone will be in 12.

Haymitch grimaces as he tries to sit up. “What is all this shit on my stomach?”

“That’s the scar treatment. Once they got you all sewed back together again they plaster that stuff on there and in another day you’ll be good as new.” Briar makes a face and adds drily, “Couldn’t have the Capitol’s darlings being all marked up with reminders of what they did to us, could they.”

The burning in Haymitch’s stomach isn’t just from the axe now. Some reserve store of furious energy ignites and he rips the bandages off his stomach, much to Briar’s dismay. He gulps back the nausea that rises in his throat upon seeing at least fifty angry red sutures in his skin. “ _Fuck_ that,” he seethes, “and fuck _anyone_ who thinks I’m gonna go through all that just to let them pretend it never - ”

“ _Shut up!_ ” Briar hisses, shaking him by the shoulders. “Jesus, haven’t you pissed them off enough already? Stop making this worse for yourself!” Seeing no comprehension in Haymitch’s eyes, his mentor releases him with an exasperated sigh. “The Capitol does not take kindly to being made to look stupid, Haymitch. It’s bad enough that you used the force field to your advantage, which I guarantee you will not get off easy for. Being difficult now will only make it worse.”

Haymitch snorts. “Make it worse? I was just in the fucking Hunger Games. There’s not a lot of _worse_ that Snow can do to me.”

Briar’s exasperation gives way to anger. “Wake up, kid, you aren’t the only person you need to worry about anymore! You have a little brother! You have a family!”

Haymitch fights the morphling in his veins dulling his usually quick mind.

Briar lowers his voice to hiss in his ear, “where the hell do you think my family is?” The horrible comprehension finally clicks, filling his ribcage with ice. “If you don’t want that happening to yours, you’d better start doing exactly what Snow wants you to do. And I’ll be honest with you kid, you’re not off to a good start.”

\-----

Every last citizen of District 12, it seems, has gathered in the square for the train’s return. They all seem about as happy as they could be for their victory, if three steel coffins instead of four can even be called a win. He had won, and yet the train back to 12 still brings one more dead child than usual. The crowd presses in, all wanting to congratulate him, and he’s glad for his mentor and his escort on either side leading him to Victors’ Village so he won’t have to stop and chat with all these people. Finally he sees the only people he actually wants to talk to: the families of the tributes. He breaks into a run and crashes into his mother’s embrace, and Asher wraps his arms around them both.

“Mom,” he chokes, unable to form any more coherent thoughts as he buries his face in her hair and she crushes hers into his shoulder. He feels the fabric of his shirt dampening there and hugs her tighter. After another moment he releases her and turns to hug his brother properly. “Swear you’ve grown about a foot and a half since I last saw you, Ash,” he says, scuffing a hand through his little brother’s curly hair.

Asher grins up at him. “You’re such a badass,” he says. Their mother doesn’t even chastise his language.

Haymitch hugs him again. “I missed you, brother.”

The three of them stay like that as long as he can justify, and then he straightens himself up again. He knows he needs to greet the other tributes’ families, and does so in a bit of a daze. Later he only remembers snatches of tear-stained faces and faltering handshakes, his own condolences that felt hollow and ineffectual, and the way Maysilee’s twin had clung to him and shaken with silent sobs.

Most of the Abernathys’ belongings have already been moved to a house in Victors’ Village. Since the house is already lavishly furnished, they leave most of their tattered old Seam furniture at their tattered old Seam house. When Haymitch steps inside, he’s surprised to be greeted by the mouthwatering smell of cooking meat. He follows his nose to the kitchen - did the house come with chef service or something? - and had the breath knocked out of him by the dark grey eyes that met him there. Aspen.

He moves toward her like he’s floating. When she embraces him he never wants to let go. He wraps one arm around her waist, one hand holding the back of her head, holding her so tight they can barely breathe, but he doesn’t care, Aspen is more important than breathing. If he could never breathe in the soft, piney scent of her hair again, he’d never want to breathe again at all.

She lifts her head a bit. “They wouldn’t let me stand with your family at the train station, so I thought this might be the next best thing,” she says into his ear.

“It’s perfect,” he says, voice muffled against her neck, “you’re perfect. You’re the most perfect person who’s ever walked this earth.”

“I also thought, now that you’ve got all this lovely top-shelf Capitol food, you should have someone around to cook it who won’t disgrace it the way your awful cooking would,” she teases, grinning up at him.

He laughs. “Please, like yours is so much better.” But then again, he thinks, breathing in the delicious scent around them, perhaps she’d been an excellent cook all along, doing her best with what they could afford but held back by lackluster ingredients.

“Hm,” she replies, “we’ll see about that in fifteen minutes when this pork shoulder is done.”

… _pork shoulder?!_

“A whole... pork shoulder...?”

Haymitch sounds as stunned as he feels. He can’t remember the last time he had pork. He can’t remember if he’s ever had pork. Pork had to be shipped in from District 10 and sold at the town butcher shop, and if something couldn’t be locally sourced and bought at the Hob - venison, squirrel, turkey, things indigenous to the woods around them - Haymitch had probably never seen much of it.

“Holy shit. I guess I really am rich now. That’ll feed both our families for a week.”

After their bafflingly lavish dinner, pleasantly stuffed with pork shoulder and roasted root vegetables and wine, Mrs. Abernathy and Aspen’s parents chat merrily in the kitchen over their drinks while Haymitch and Asher and Aspen click through the television in the living room. It has electricity all the time, not just during mandatory viewings, and almost a hundred channels. They laugh heartily at the ridiculous programs the people in the Capitol watch. Haymitch thinks he’d probably find them less funny and more revolting if he hadn’t had that third drink, but right now he doesn’t care. He’s home. He’s surrounded by everyone he loves, he doesn’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from ever again, and he can finally let himself relax if just for a night. Aspen leans closer against his chest, and he squeezes his arm around her. He kisses her nose and ruffles his brother’s hair and thinks maybe things will be okay.

When the sun sinks low over the treetops, Mrs. Abernathy tells the three of them that Aspen is welcome to stay the night and that Mr. and Mrs. Crag are going with her to fetch one more load of their stuff from the Seam house. “Mrmph. Alright. Be safe,” Haymitch bids them sleepily. The three of them fall asleep in a big pile on the couch before the parents come back.

“Haymitch.”

“Mrmph.”

“Haymitch!”

“Go away.”

“Haymitch, seriously! Wake up!”

Haymitch finally registers the urgency in his brother’s voice and sits up, rubbing his eyes. “What’s wrong, Asher?”

“Mom never came back last night.”

Haymitch’s stomach drops. “Maybe she slept at the old house. It was almost dark when they left, maybe it took longer than they thought and they decided to wait till morning.” He tries to assuage his younger brother’s distress, but he’s terrified too. Terrified of retribution from Snow. Already he feels foolish for thinking even for a moment last night that he might be safe now. His mind races through possibilities of where she could be, keeping the increasingly horrifying ones in his head and offering the kinder explanations to Asher. “Maybe she wanted to sleep at the old house, Ash, she’s been really attached to it since Dad died.” Which was plausible enough; even after Haymitch had gotten a job apprenticing with a metalworker and the extra income could potentially afford them a nicer Seam house, their mother couldn’t bring herself to leave the house that she and their father had moved into when they first married.

The three of them splash water on their faces and stuff their feet into their boots and get ready to go look for her.

Haymitch pauses at the half-open door to the master bedroom. It looks like his mother hadn’t even set foot in there yet. As he turns to leave, a flash of white catches his eye: a single radiant white rose in a bud vase on the nightstand. Haymitch’s heart pounds as he crosses the floor shakily. There’s a note under it.

_Glad to see you’ve made it back to District 12, Mr. Abernathy. Do try not to cause any more trouble between now and your victory tour. We look forward to seeing you back in the Capitol. President Snow_

All the air in his lungs is suddenly replaced with lead. He knows, in that horribly certain way that unspoken and unproven things can somehow be explicitly obvious in nightmares, that his mother is dead.

His feet carry him back to the kitchen without him telling them to. Somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, he can hear a knock on the door, pained voices from outside - neighbors maybe, or some of the kinder peacekeepers - talking to Asher and Aspen, snatches of “freak accident,” “so sorry,” “carbon monoxide,” “maybe a water heater explosion,” “found all three of them this morning on our way to work,” “house is totally destroyed,” “you poor kids, everything you’ve been through...”

His eyes, which haven’t registered anything since the white rose, land on a half-full wine bottle from last night. He uncorks it and takes a swig. There’s nothing else to be done.

Somewhere in his mind, Haymitch thinks it is fortuitous, in a grotesque, ironic sort of way, that he had to grow up so fast back when his dad died. He had learned such things as how to make funeral arrangements at his mother’s shaking side. Now, able to mechanically go through the same motions on autopilot again, he’s glad that at least Aspen and Asher, in their numb shock, don’t have to worry about figuring out what caskets to buy or where to bury them. Perhaps it would have been simpler back when the options were much narrower due to funds available, but now that he has his victor’s winnings, he feels he owes it to them to bury them as well as he can.

After the funerals, Haymitch and Aspen collapse into the master bed. She doesn’t ask if she can stay and he doesn’t ask if she wants to. They pass a bottle back and forth. Not too much later, Asher crawls into bed with them. He asks for a sip and Haymitch gives it to him. He coughs on it and takes another.

The months leading up to the victory tour blur by. The three of them go back to school, which feels absurdly ordinary to Haymitch. Sometimes the familiarity is a comfort, but usually it feels too obscene to just drop right back into his normal old teenage life when the normal kid he’d been didn’t exist anymore. His old friends look glad to see him, but always act like they don’t know what to say around him anymore. Haymitch doesn’t blame them. He keeps his job with the metalworker, just to keep himself occupied. He’s determined to go through the motions and keep his chin up, if nothing else just so he won’t be a burden to Aspen and Asher, who have suffered enough at his hands. But the nights still come with their constant looming promise of dreams filled with dread and blood and explosions in a house that doesn’t even have a water heater. Aspen strokes his hair silently when he jerks awake with his heart racing. He does the same for her when she does. He can’t tell her about any of it yet. She doesn’t ask.

On the worst nights he wishes he had never even come home, cursing that mutinous self-preservation instinct that kept him alive in the arena. At least then Aspen would still have her parents. Asher would still have a mother. He drowns the guilt and blame in an ocean of gin and most nights Aspen and Asher don’t try to stop him. Many nights they join him. Then he shakes off the haze long enough to get through another day, and sinks back into its mocking embrace each night.

\-----

On the last night of the victory tour, after all the ridiculous speeches and parties that were all just more motions to go through, Haymitch hears a knock on the door of his room in the tribute center. He can’t imagine who would be paying a visit at this hour. Whoever it is, he thinks, guess they’re gonna get to see me drunk. He staggers to the door.

“Sheba,” he says, surprised to see his escort standing there. “What are you doing here?”

Sheba looks distressed by the alcohol he’s sure she can smell on him. “Haymitch, you have a... visitor.”

He squints at her uncomprehendingly, but dutifully pulls on a bathrobe and follows her out into the main room where President Snow is seated at the dining table. Haymitch is not too drunk for his blood to run cold.

“Do sit down, Mr. Abernathy.”

“No thanks. Fucking murderer,” he spits, turning around to go back to his room. Fucking visitor, he thinks. Christ.

“Mr. Abernathy, I would think you would have learned by now that continuing to defy me is most... imprudent.”

Haymitch freezes in place, blood turning even icier. He turns back around, making no attempt to keep the contempt off his face, stalks slowly back over to the table, and sits.

“It appears that pleasantries would be wasted on you, so I will save us both the time and omit them. I understand, Mr. Abernathy, that you recently had a birthday?”

“Yes,” he growls. 

“And how old does that make you now?”

“Seventeen.”

“Indeed. As you know, the age of sexual consent in the Capitol is seventeen. And as I’m sure you also know, there are a large number of very wealthy people in the Capitol who are, shall we say, interested in you.” Each word hits him like a battering ram.

“But. Aspen,” he chokes out, voicing the only coherent thought he could form.

“I am aware you have a girlfriend by the name of Miss Aspen Crag, a problem which I assure you I will find quite easy to remedy should you prove yourself... difficult.”

The ice leaves his veins at once, replaced by what feels like boiling pitch.

In the morning, all he can remember having said to Snow is various hazy combinations of “fuck you” and “you don’t own me” and “you already made me a murderer, you’ll never make me your whore.” His brain hasn’t accepted any of it. He wonders detachedly whether it will be his girl or his brother that is already dead by the time he gets back to 12.

Briar finds him in the bar car on the train ride back. “You’re a fucking idiot, kid, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know.”

The company of the one person in 12 who’s been through the same hell he’s living in beats drinking alone, he supposes.

He walks from the train station to Victors’ Village like a man walking to the gallows. His lungs feel like they’re full of rocks. He opens his front door and the house feels unbearably empty.

Waiting for him at the kitchen table with haunted, sightless eyes staring right past him and a single white rose in her hands is Aspen.

They don’t talk for days, just cling to each other silently. Neither of them go to school for weeks and it doesn’t even seem to matter. He doesn’t bother to call the metalworker. He just stops showing up. He sees Aspen and Asher and his mother hunted by Snow in his nightmares every night, murdered over and over and over, and alcohol only makes his subconscious ideations more feverish. He finds he can’t sleep at all without the knife he brought home from the arena within arm’s reach.

Aspen finally breaks the silence one night in the vacuous blackness of the master bedroom. She’s curled into his side, running her hand absently up and down the huge scar gashing across his bare stomach, as she often does. “This isn’t a coincidence,” she whispers.

“And you’ve known that all along.” It isn’t a question. He knows she’s too clever not to have put two and two together.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t say anything,” he said, and this time it does sound like a question.

“I wanted to ask what happened to make him do all this. But I didn’t want to sound like I was blaming you. You blame yourself enough already.”

“Yeah, cause it’s my fucking fault.”

At this, she throws one leg over him to sit across his lap and locks her eyes on his with a ferocity he hasn’t seen since the arena. “ _None of this_ ,” she growls, “is your fault.”

He’s surprised by a pleasant warmth twisting in his stomach, one he thought he might never find the energy for again. “It is,” he whispers. “I could have stopped it.”

“How?” she asks, close enough to feel her breath on his ear. “What did he want you to do?”

He swallows. “I think - at first - with our parents...” Deep breath. “I think with them it was already too late. I think... that was because I used the force field as a weapon. Snow and the gamemakers don’t like to be outsmarted.” She listens silently, hands still roaming over his skin. “But with Asher...” his voice breaks. “I can’t believe I was so stupid. It was on the victory tour, and he came to my room the last night and said there were people who wanted to... buy me. Like. As a prostitute.”

“Oh, God,” she breathes into his neck. “I had always thought that was just a rumor.” She sits up. “God, that is _rape_ , Haymitch, how does he get away with it??”

“By killing your family if you say no,” he answers hollowly.

“I hate him,” she says, her fury subsiding into misery.

He holds her tighter. “Me too, sweetheart.”

“Do you think he’ll ask again?”

“Yes. I don’t think he’ll stop asking until he’s murdered every bit of leverage he has on me.”

She’s silent for a bit, taking a moment to understand what those words meant for her. “I won’t blame you if you don’t go through with it.” He looks at her like she’s lost her mind, but before he can speak, she says, “and I also won’t blame you if you do. Haymitch, I would sooner die than make you go through with that, but I’d also sooner die than let you go through your whole life blaming yourself for losing me because you think you could have stopped it. So whatever you have to do... I’ll understand.”

He’s simultaneously awed and heartbroken by her understanding. “I can’t lose you,” he breathes raggedly. “I have to do it.”

She sucks in a deep breath, and says, “okay.”

He lifts a hand to her cheek and thumbs away the wetness in her eye. “I don’t know why you’d still want to stay with me when I put you through all this. I could live a thousand lifetimes and never deserve you.”

“That’s not true. None of this is your fault. You’re the strongest person I know.” Her hands keep trailing the slash of shiny pink scar tissue that shatters his stomach. “Just... think of me when you’re with them?” she asks, pain finally cracking through the determination of her voice.

“How can you stand it,” he asks, agonized by what he’s asking of her.

“It’ll eviscerate me,” she said, voice raw and throbbing, “but not because of what you’re doing, because you’re not doing it. They’re doing this to you.” Another tear spills over. “I could never be jealous of someone who was with you under... those circumstances. It’s not even _you_.”

“Eviscerate you, huh,” he says wryly, bringing his hands to meet hers on his stomach. “I know the feeling.”

She breathes a halfhearted laugh with sad eyes. “I wish you didn’t.”

“It’s alright. You should see the other guy,” Haymitch jokes weakly. He tries to push away the image of Callista’s ruined face, but he doesn’t regret the joke. It’s not like he ever stops seeing that fucking face anyway. He might as well learn to joke about it.

Aspen doesn’t seem to get it, but she seems to understand that she can’t. By way of response, she bends her head to trail burning kisses down the scar, then lower along the jut of his hip bone. Warmth curls through him again and he threads his fingers through her hair, closes his eyes, and tries to think of nothing but the sweet heat of her mouth.

The house still feels mercilessly lonely, but now that they’re communicating again, the despair feels the tiniest fraction less crushing. Aspen cooks dinner again sometimes. They don’t go back to school, but Haymitch calls the administration and they arrange to have schoolwork sent out to Victors’ Village to work on remotely if they feel up to it, and maybe graduate eventually. He calls his metalworking mentor and apologizes for disappearing, and she forgives him immediately. She says of course my dear boy, I don’t blame you one bit, what with everything you’ve been through, and call me if there’s anything you need.

The nights still come, though, and they feel colder and emptier than ever without Asher climbing into bed with them half the time. They drink to keep the nightmares at bay and the nightmares only get worse. One night Haymitch jerks awake well and truly screaming, and when Aspen tries to comfort him, he claws at his face with his hands and gasps out, “he was there - in the arena with me - I killed him, Aspen, it’s - my fault he’s dead - it’s all my fault-” He slumps into her shoulder and lets himself be caught off guard by the sobs that wrack his body. He’d shed a few tears at each of the funerals, but those hadn’t ever really felt like real life. It had seemed like watching it from outside his body. But maybe finally feeling every bit of the pain of his brother’s absence was better than the weeks and months of nothingness. He owed it to Asher.

\-----

All too soon it’s reaping day again, and Haymitch is already drunk. Haymitch will be on his way back to the Capitol tonight as a mentor, where President Snow is surely awaiting his arrival. The dread had grown bigger and darker in their peripherals with every day nearer they drew to the reaping, and now it’s finally upon them. Haymitch and Aspen had spent the entire sleepless night in desperate, terrified embraces, trying to burn each other into the backs of their eyelids, trying to create something to cling to while Haymitch was in the Capitol doing what they both knew he’d be doing.

He’s fully prepared to be useless as a mentor this year, and Briar seems to grudgingly understand that. He was the first victor ever to come from 12, so he had had no mentor, and no predecessor to pull his weight in the mentoring business during the first few years when the trauma was still so fresh. But Briar is decent enough not to begrudge Haymitch those privileges that he wished he had during his own first year as mentor.

Haymitch blocks out the reaping as much as he can and when it’s over, searches for Aspen to say goodbye before he gets back on that infernal train. She’s waiting for him in the train station. He gathers her up in his arms and she crushes her mouth to his in one last searing kiss.

“I love you, sweetheart,” he breathes in her ear, “more than anything. More than oxygen.”

“I love you too, Haymitch. More than anything. Be strong.”

Then Sheba is there telling him the train is leaving and he’d better be on it, and Aspen is ushered away from him, and he stares after her until he can’t see her anymore.

Haymitch actually does make an effort to stay sober during the trip and try to help coach the tributes, petrified little waifs who reminded him painfully of the two younger tributes from 12 last year. Both had been killed in the initial bloodbath. But despite having little hope for them, he’s determined to do everything right this week, determined not to destroy his and Aspen’s lives more than he already has. Soon enough, the day comes when they’re shipped off to the arena, and Haymitch is trying to decide whether or not to start drinking now when a knock comes to his door again.

“President Snow,” he addresses tonelessly.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Abernathy. May I come in?” Haymitch steps aside. Snow sits at that same dining table again. “I’d ask you about your tributes, but I sense that your distaste for pleasantries has not abated since we last met.”

“I would agree.”

“Indeed. Be that as it may, I hope you have come to your senses regarding the topic of your... resistance to me.”

“Yes,” he grits out.

“Excellent. Now, regarding my earlier proposition. Your district’s escort, Miss Sheba Santos, has volunteered to serve as your manager. I think she’s the natural choice, since you two are already acquainted. And if I’m not mistaken, I believe we already have an appointment for you tonight. One Miss Elsa Edgeworth has bid quite the handsome sum for the pleasure of your company. She has booked a room in this very building. Miss Santos will escort you there at 9pm tonight.”

Haymitch makes a concerted effort to unclench his jaw. “Out of curiosity, may I inquire as to how much I cost?”

Snow almost laughs at that. “Roughly the value of one gamemaker’s monthly income, Mr. Abernathy. Good day.” He stands to leave.

Haymitch swallows at the nausea rising in his throat. Just when he thought this whole nightmare couldn’t get any more sickening. He’s being sold to pay people to invent entertaining ways to kill him and everyone like him. If it was anyone but Aspen, he thinks, there’s no way he could stomach it. But he has to. It’s her life on the line, and without her his life would not be livable. Snow had already taken everything else, consumed it like a burnt offering along with the tributes, the children sacrificed to atone for the sins of their fathers, which, against a vengeful un-god like Snow, were really no sin at all.

Haymitch makes himself wait until 8:30 to pour himself a drink. He wonders, absurdly, what he should wear, and dismisses the thought a moment later. It wouldn’t matter. He splashes water on his face and wonders how old Miss Elsa Edgeworth is. With what she’s paying for him, he knows he won’t get away with just lying there and waiting for it to be over, and he thinks maybe if it’s someone young and pretty it’ll be easier to pretend. He gulps down some more of his drink.

Elsa Edgeworth is, mercifully, not an old hag. She’s probably 35 and reasonably athletic, dressed in a silky red bathrobe, with short spiky dark hair and eyes so electrically green they hurt to look at. He thinks it could be much worse.

Much like Snow, Elsa does not waste much time on pleasantries, and Haymitch is glad for it. No sense in dragging it out. He wonders distantly whether Snow charges for him by the hour or by the night.

Elsa leads him by the hand to a bedroom and nudges him toward the bed until the backs of his legs are against it. She divests him of his shirt first, pausing when she sees his scar. “That’s odd,” she says, running a sharp-nailed finger along it, “usually you lot get doctored up much better afterwards.” He tries not to think about how she knows that.

“I wanted to keep mine,” he says. He doesn’t feel like he owes her any more explanation than that. She doesn’t seem bothered though, just shrugs and slips off her bathrobe. She’s got matching red lingerie on underneath. She doesn’t look half bad and Haymitch is almost relieved. Maybe this wouldn’t be so unbearable. He wishes more than anything it was Aspen here with him, but if this is what it would take to keep her safe, he could do it. He reaches out for Elsa’s hands to help her up onto the bed and faces her.

“Do you want me to, ah... do anything in particular,” he asks, trying not to sound as young as he felt, “or just follow your lead?”

She gives him a knife-edged smile and he notices for the first time that she has what appear to be tiny emeralds embedded in her canine teeth. “Follow my lead, baby boy,” she purrs, sitting up on her knees to reach for his belt. “You’re all so much prettier when you don’t know what you’re doing yet.” He tries not to shudder at that.

She snatches up his face in her hands and kisses him, and he thinks with his eyes closed it’s not so bad. She doesn’t kiss like Aspen, but kissing is still nice. She tugs his pants off and casts them aside, and he tries to let himself enjoy it. Aspen’s safety is directly proportional to how good a time this woman has. She lays back onto the pillows and pulls him over her, and when he kisses her neck, she lets out a few soft, melting sounds and tugs on his hair as if to drag his head downward. He focuses his attentions a few inches south for a bit, and then a few more inches south, and even if she doesn’t taste or smell or sound like Aspen, he couldn’t pretend this didn’t do anything for him. He tries to make it good for her. She seems to be enjoying herself just fine, he thinks, she’s making enough noise anyway. Aspen is almost always nearly silent; her small, gasping ah’s breaking off in her throat are a sacred litany he could spend his whole life chasing. Even just thinking of them now sends a rush of blood southward that he thinks will probably be very useful quite soon.

Elsa drags him back up and kisses him again. He kisses back and wonders if she can taste herself in his mouth. His blood prickles warmly at the thought; it’s unexpectedly kind of hot. Emboldened by the twisting in his stomach and the tingling in his veins, Haymitch flips them over so she’s straddling his lap now and drags his nails down her back. Her expression turns wicked, teeth-emeralds glinting in the half-light. “Slow down there, baby boy,” she growls, running her hands through his hair down to his neck and grinding her ass down against him. “I’m calling the shots here.” And with that, she tightens her hands around his neck, cutting off his breath, and Haymitch’s eyes fly wide open because the scene has abruptly changed. He is no longer in the tribute center underneath Elsa Edgeworth.

His panicking eyes flicker around and see nothing but endless expanses of green grass and pink sky and sick-sweet flowers, and the hands around his neck are the boy from District 4, choking the life out of him and pinning him with his knees, reaching for the knife that would slit Haymitch’s constricted throat in a matter of seconds. In a frenzied burst of adrenaline and fight-or-flight reflexes, he throws the other tribute off him and scrambles around to throw him against the ground so hard it knocks him out cold. Haymitch breathes hard as he keeps the boy from 4 pinned down by the throat under his forearm, casting around frantically for the knife he had dropped in the scuffle. As he looks around, though, the brilliant green grass is fading into dark walls and bedsheets before his eyes. He looks down and sees that the person he had knocked out and is now pinning against the ground, which is actually the headboard of an unfamiliar bed, is not the tribute from district 4 at all, but the green-eyed Capitol woman who had purchased his company from President Snow.

The whole earth plunges out from under him.

He had one shot to save Aspen. And that one shot was lying lifeless before him, unconscious and concussed.

Panic and terror like he had never known - not when his name was called in the reaping, not with three career tributes attacking him at once, not even as he watched the light leave the eyes of the first life he had ended - fill his ribcage and pound deafening in his ears, all-consuming, apocalyptic, flaying his soul away from the shell-shocked husk of him that was left disintegrating in that sepulchral rent-room.

He grabs whatever of his clothes he can reach and runs until he can collapse back on the floor of his room and feel his shock coalesce into an ultimate, eternal, plummeting vacuum of despair for what feels like the hundredth - and final - time.

That was his last shot.

He will never see Aspen again.

\-----

Days and nights and hours and minutes collapse into years. The books and papers the school sent for him and Aspen end up kindling in his fireplace and he doesn’t even notice. He single-handedly doubles the Hob’s market demand for white liquor. Tributes from 12 line up and die over and over and over and he doesn’t even flinch at it anymore. Briar pisses off the wrong person in the Capitol one year and gets himself killed, leaving the desolation of Victors’ Village to resound in the empty cavern of Haymitch’s ribcage. He can no longer bear to look at the master bed he had shared with Aspen; most nights he doesn’t even attempt the couch and just passes out at the kitchen table where he’s been deliriously threatening shadows and field mice, arena-knife in one hand and empty bottle in the other. Sheba gets promoted to District 8 and is replaced by an obnoxious upstart who is somehow even more frivolous and airheaded. He bickers with her just for something to do.

Ironically, he actually starts looking forward to the Hunger Games each year. The tributes he’s supposed to mentor are almost always lost causes that he can barely waste his time on. But in the tribute center each year, he finds himself in the company of other mentors - other victors who have either been whored out by Snow or lost their families to him, or both. It’s not much solace, but as it had been with Briar, having someone around who’s equally familiar with the particular hell you’re living is better than drinking alone. Chaff from District 11 is good company. He can even get a dried-out laugh out of Haymitch sometimes.

For some reason it’s barely even a deterrent that Snow is also there in the Capitol. Haymitch doesn’t have the energy to hate him anymore. Snow had always been inevitable. He takes a grim sort of satisfaction in knowing at least Snow can’t control him anymore, now that there’s no one left to leverage against him. And every time he sees Snow’s face, it reminds him never to make new leverage for Snow to murder.

He still wakes up screaming. Telling Asher to run. Begging Aspen to forgive him.

Two decades crawl by like this.

\-----

Having spent about a month out of each of those years in the company of the new escort, Effie Trinket, Haymitch comes to the conclusion he actually likes her better than Sheba. Sheba had never pretended she wasn’t chomping at the bit to move to a better district, but while Effie may have thought like that initially, she seems to have gotten rather attached to 12. He even heard she had gotten an offer from District 10 and turned it down. Grudgingly he has to admit that she has a heart and maybe even a brain somewhere underneath all the face paint and wigs and preposterous outfits, and he’s glad she’s around to tell their tributes what to do so he doesn’t have to. The stick up her ass can get irritating sometimes, but she’s a hoot to bicker with. With all those delicate Capitol sensibilities, it’s all too easy to ruffle her feathers.

It happens during the 71st Hunger Games, he thinks. He and Effie and some of the less-insufferable stylists were watching their screen, raising a glass because their tributes had actually survived the initial bloodbath this year and joking about which dumbass gamemaker had managed to put the tributes’ projections in the sky in the wrong order, and it registers suddenly that they are, in some ass-backwards kind of way, friends.

He notices that she leaves water and aspirin next to him wherever he passes out when she’s around, and thinks maybe he can do this. Maybe he can have a friend. He makes an effort to shower more and swear less when she’s around. Then he notices that when she inspects his hair for the thousandth time, needling him to get it cut or at least wash it before this interview or that, her hands linger there a bit longer than necessary, and his walls slam back down again. He pushes her away as dispassionately as he can, often more harshly depending on how much he’s had to drink, and tells himself it’s for her own good. He can have a friend, maybe. But nothing more. He doesn’t have it in him anymore. Any capacity for love he might have once had has been excavated, incinerated out of him by Snow.

\-----

They’re halfway through the 74th Hunger Games and, impossibly, insanely, both of their tributes are still alive. Haymitch has a tiny spark of hope for them that hadn’t smoldered in 24 years. Finally they have kids who are fighters, kids Haymitch can pull for, who light a fire under him to actually get involved and pursue sponsors. Then the announcement comes that both of their tributes might come home if they win and Effie actually cries tears of joy. Haymitch fills his whisky glass with champagne, then pours some for Effie and the prep teams and a few of his victor acquaintances, Chaff from 11 and Flax from 9, who had come by their room to watch.

A battered part of his brain tells him not to count his chickens before they hatch, not to get all excited over a couple of kids who might still die any second, but he drowns it out. It’s been years since he felt this alive. It’s been years since he felt alive at all.

Haymitch and Effie keep watching Katniss and Peeta curled up in their cave long after everyone else has gone to bed. He gets up to refill his glass in the suite’s little kitchen, and startles when he turns back around because Effie is standing right in front of him. She meets his eyes and holds out her glass for a refill. He holds her stare and obliges. Emboldened by champagne and the high of their tributes’ good fortune, Effie takes an uncharacteristically audacious step toward him and ghosts her fingers feather-lightly at his hip, sliding under his shirt, stopping abruptly when they reach his scar. Frozen, he sees the cogs whirring in her brain, eyes wide as she remembers his last minutes in the arena.

“How-?” she whispers. “I thought they always - at the remake center - after you get out of the hospital-“

He cuts her off with a hand around her invading wrist, so tight it hurts, as if he’s going to push her away, though he doesn’t yet. “Yeah, they do. But I wouldn’t. And that’s exactly why we... can’t,” he says, words slurring slightly but eyes still burning into hers. “I resisted them since day one and got everyone I loved killed for it. And knowing me, sweetheart, I’ll do it again, so do yourself a favor and keep your distance.” He turns away, slugging back another gulp of his drink. “All you’d be is leverage for him to use against me.”

Somewhere under the fog of alcohol he knows he’s being cruel, but as much as he wishes he didn’t have to hurt his friend, he knows she won’t give up if she thinks he wants this too. Squeezing his eyes shut, he shoves her hand off and turns to go shut the door to his room decisively between them. She stares after him, eyes shining but upper lip stiff. He doesn’t look back.

He dreams of Aspen that night.

\-----

It’s the 75th Hunger Games and it occurs to Haymitch for the first time that, even if he had new murderable loved ones, he wouldn’t be in danger of being forced into prostitution anymore. 41 might not necessarily be too old, but he knows it’s not the years but the mileage that has taken its toll. Not that it matters much anymore, but the decades spent at the bottom of the bottle have sapped the color and elasticity from his skin and disassembled the proportions of his once-athletic body. He knows he’s still not terrible to look at, but with twenty-four younger, prettier victors between him and the demand, he’s far from the top of their priority list.

But now, on the brink of a civil war that he’s helping to incite, he has new reasons to be scared of Snow. New reasons he can’t let anyone close enough to be used against him.

\-----

War is raging and Effie is a prisoner of war being held in the Capitol. Haymitch had thought keeping her at an arm’s length would keep her safe. But now they were torturing her to torture him just like they were using Peeta and Annie to break Katniss and Finnick and somehow after all these agonizing years he’d been played for a fool again.

He will never be out of these crosshairs until President Snow is dead. He summons the decimated shreds of the conviction that once raged inside him and pours every fiber of it into his role in the revolution. Haymitch Abernathy will live to see a world without Coriolanus Snow if it goddamn kills him.

\-----

The war is over. President Snow is dead, lynched by a mob of his own people. President Coin is dead, assassinated by the hand of her own deputy. The world is shattered but he thinks when it is rebuilt, with Paylor in charge, it might finally be somewhere worth living. He stays in Victors’ Village in the ruins of District 12, watching his people pick up the pieces, trying to keep Katniss from drowning in the loss of her sister the way he had once drowned.

One day he gets a knock on his front door and Effie Trinket is standing in front of him. She still wears her makeup, but not as much. Her colorful outfit, covered in gauzy flowers, strikes him as almost charming instead of ridiculous. She has a scarf around her head instead of her usual wigs.

She says something about being in 12 on business for her new job as a district ambassador. He pulls her inside and cuts her off with the kiss he wishes he could have given her years ago. She makes a sweet surprised noise in the back of her throat and melts into him, kissing back with an unexpected intensity that he thinks might almost start to thaw his glacier-buried heart.

Haymitch wakes up the next morning to the feeling of feather-light fingers tracing his stomach scar, and for a second he’s cut loose from time, lying in the glow of morning light with Aspen curled around him and Asher in the next room and his mother downstairs making pancakes for breakfast. Then the years come flooding back, along with the aching weight of their loss. It hasn’t gotten any lighter after all these years, but he thinks maybe he’s gotten stronger.

He stills Effie’s hand with his own and rolls toward her to kiss her forehead. “Got a lot of important ambassador responsibilities to attend to today?”

“Mrmph. Not exactly. I may have lied about that.”

That gets a genuine laugh out of Haymitch. “You are full of surprises, Effie Trinket.”

“Not about being the district ambassador. That really is my new title. Paylor is setting up a whole committee of ambassadors for each district to improve communication and make decisions more democratically,” Effie tells him. “But I took a weekend off.”

He can’t resist kissing her again. “I’m glad you did,” he mumbles against her neck. “You’re perfect for that job. They’d be stupid not to choose you.”

“They didn’t choose me, exactly... the ambassador committee was my idea.” She sounds somehow both proud and shy.

He leans up on his elbow to look her in the eyes for a long moment. “I don’t know how I looked at you for so long without seeing you.”

She blushes and looks away. “You had a lot of more important things on your mind.”

“I did. But now I don’t. And someday I’ll explain why I pushed you away for so long and tell you I’m sorry,” he says, “if you’ll let me. But for now, I think our mockingjay next door could use a hot breakfast.” He kisses her forehead again. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

\-----

Every year, letters from Annie Cresta arrive in Victors’ Village announcing a birthday party for her son, and all the old faces reconvene in District 4 to catch up on each other’s new lives. Katniss’s mother cries when she meets her grandchildren. The little girl looks so much like Prim. It takes a few years, but eventually Katniss finds it in herself to forgive Gale, and while they’ll never be as close as they used to, everyone’s relieved they’ve healed enough to be friends again. Gale ends up becoming better friends with Johanna during these yearly parties, always laughing as they exchange horror stories of trying to get a fresh start when your face had spent the whole war on posters with a bounty under it. After three years of competing over whose attempts at post-war romantic endeavors are more hideously unsuccessful, they decide that since it can’t get any worse anyway the two of them might as well give it a shot. She’s all too eager to relocate to District 2; she says everyone back in 7 still looks at her like she’s a grenade that’s about to go off. Gale makes some playful dig that it’s probably just because she kept her buzz cut after the war, and she cuffs him on the back of the head. She ends up showing quite as much talent in his industry as he does, and she seems to be getting more comfortable in 2. She still doesn’t keep her nails very clean, but she finds she’s not as repulsed by water when she’s got someone to shower with.

\-----

It’s been five years since the ash settled and the dust cleared. Katniss and Peeta live in the house next door in Victors’ Village, and their kids come over almost every day to help their Uncle Haymitch feed his geese. He still drinks, but not in the apocalyptic way that he used to. Effie spends a week out of every month in District 12, volunteering with their rebuilding efforts and sitting in on their town hall meetings, scribbling pages and pages of feedback to take back to Paylor’s ambassador committee. In the evenings she brings questions back to Haymitch about District 12 concerns that her Capitol upbringing left her unaware of. His explanations are sometimes amused but never condescending, and she drinks up every word. She stays with him when she’s in town, and the circumstances suit him just fine. It’ll be a while yet, he thinks, before he can grow back whatever it was that let him love Aspen and his family so fiercely.

But these new companions are more than he would have ever believed he could have again. And slowly but surely, he’s learning to believe it - he doesn’t have to be alone anymore.


End file.
